Michelangelo

mi-kel-an'je-lo (1475-1564), an Italian sculptor, painter, and architect. He was born at Caprese, Tuscany. He died at Rome. No other intellect has so excelled in three departments of art. From boyhood he displayed ability and intense application. Before he was thirty, a statue of David and a painting called the Cartoon of Pisa, representing Pisan soldiers surprised by Florentines while bathing in the Arno, placed him at the head of the artists of Italy. He was invited to Rome to decorate the ceiling of the pope's new chapel, intended to be the finest in Christendom. He had scaffolding erected so that he could walk on a floor under the ceiling. He devised a cardboard helmet somewhat like a miner's cap, to carry his candle at night. He took the keys of the building, shut out every living soul, and for twenty months, extended through a period of four years, he walked and thought, and sketched and corrected and painted the greatest series of pictures the world has ever seen. The entire ceiling is divided into compartments of various shapes and sizes. Each contains a subject. Several, as the Creation of the World, the Creation of Man, and the Creation of Eve, are taken from the Old Testament, while figures seeming to hang from the divisions or ribs of the ceiling depict individual patriarchs, prophets, and sibyls.

A few years later he painted the Last Judgment for the end of the chapel. It represents the scene at the end of the world described by Matthew, "They shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." Three hundred personages are grouped in this "vast poem." Christ, the dread and impartial judge in the center, unmoved by the tears of his mother and attendant saints, weighs in a just balance the deeds and the secret thoughts of men. The last trumpets are blowing, graves are giving up their dead, while waiting angels convey the souls of the saved to eternal bliss, and the souls of the damned into everlasting punishment. It is a surprise to learn that, in addition to many masterpieces of sculpture and painting, Michelangelo also drew the plans for the dome of St. Peter's, and was counted one of the architects of his day. His chief sculptures are statues of David and Moses executed for the pope.

Michelangelo lived a solitary life, wrapped up in his art, and in his own wild, melancholy thoughts. As Emerson says:

Among artists he occupied the place accorded Shakespeare among men of letters. No greater tribute can be paid one mighty intellect than to say he fashioned the Moses, he painted the Last Judgment, and he raised the dome of St. Peter's.

See St. Peter'S; Raphael